A new camera designed with a curved detection surface allows imaging devices to see as animals do.
The camera, inspired by the human eye, relies on the ability to construct silicon electronics on a stretchable membrane, BBC reported.
In the future, these electronic membranes could be wrapped around human organs to act as health monitoring devices, say US-based developers.
The new technology is described in a paper in the journal Nature.
Photosensitive displays - like the ones used in digital cameras - are made up of thousands of pixels and are usually formed on a flat, rigid, semiconductor wafer, explained Dr John Rogers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US, who led the team of researchers.
"No animal's eyes are like that; the retina is curved," Dr Rogers said.
"This curvature allows animals to see the world without distortion - unlike the images produced from cameras, which lose focus at the periphery."
Hoping to improve digital imaging, the Illinois-based researcher and his team, joined up with a group of mechanical engineers from Northwestern University, to make a camera shaped more like an eye.
The challenge was to import the thin, brittle wafer-based camera technology to a curved surface. The result was a 2cm-wide camera with a single, simple lens and a concave light detection system.